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Customer application 3 May 2018

The Energy-Efficient Porcelain Factory

The porcelain manufacturer BHS tabletop AG has invested in a new combined heat and power plant in Schönwald, partially modernized its heat distribution system and installed a central control system with increased operational reliability. This saves the company a lot of energy.

200 million people in more than 100 countries eat off porcelain products from BHS tabletop AG every day. This long-established company from Selb, in the Upper Franconia region of Bavaria, is the global market leader in professional porcelain with its Bauscher, Tafelstern and Schönwald brands and sells around 40 million pieces of tableware a year to the catering industry, hotels, airlines, shipping lines, corporate cafeterias, chain restaurants, retirement homes and hospitals. The company, which grew out of the former Hutschenreuther AG, employs around 1,150 people at its three sites in Selb, Weiden and Schönwald. Since firing porcelain requires a lot of energy, climate and environmental protection are of paramount importance to BHS. In order to keep the energy actually required as low as possible and use it for several purposes at the same time, the company has fundamentally altered its production, reducing energy consumption by a third over the past 15 years. This also enabled it to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in production.

Systematic Energy Management

In 2012, BHS was the first porcelain industry company in the world to be certified in accordance with the DIN EN ISO 50001 testing guidelines and has since been successfully recertified. In doing so, it met the requirements of the German Energy Services Act (EDL-G) long before it became mandatory and operated a systematic energy management system. The monitoring aspect helps identify and leverage efficiency potential. For example, better synchronization of four compressors has led to energy savings of around 20 percent.

In addition, BHS has already been certified in accordance with the DIN EN ISO 14001:2015 international standard for environmental management systems since 2011 for systematic management of environmental protection requirements. The company also operates a water treatment plant and fully recycles all raw materials and intermediate products.

BHS also meets modern standards in energy generation. In 2016, for example, it commissioned a new combined heat and power (CHP) plant with buffer storage and an exhaust gas heat exchanger at its Schönwald site. “We use it to produce 70 percent of our electricity and 70 to 80 percent of our heat ourselves,” says Energy Manager Thomas Tröger of BHS.

“Therefore, as part of the energy modernization project, the heat distribution systems were partially updated. The central control system is now based on individual stations and operating levels that function autonomously, as well as an alarm server with SMS alarms integrated into the control system. This helps increase operational reliability. In addition, the central control system regulates the flow temperature, controls all the pumps and supplies all the areas with heat.

For the energy management system, various measured values such as pulse, M-Bus and Modbus IP are recorded and passed on to the monitoring system via OPC for evaluation. Based on these values, the controller calculates the information required for optimal operation of the CHP system and uses this information for control via Modbus IP.

TPN Service GmbH & Co KG was hired to perform the conversions. “The control concept is based on the WAGO industrial controller,” explains Managing Director Marco Puchalski. “We’ve already had good experiences with it on previous jobs, especially in terms of flexibility and reliability, but also in terms of price.”

In Schönwald, TPN has installed three new information centers (ISP) and converted an existing one. A controller with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), a fiber optic switch and a local visualization and logging server with touch panel are used in each control cabinet. Maximum reliability is ensured by both the redundant fiber optic cabling with spanning tree protocol (STP) and the fact that the visualization and logging servers constantly synchronize with each other, so all devices have the same data. They can be viewed and operated from any other station and can be replaced in the event of a failure.

Among themselves, the ISPs communicate via a standard fiber optic network. Thus the large distances of up to 400 meters pose no problem. Any Internet-enabled device can be used for operation and monitoring via a local, private Webserver; this approach also allows remote control via VPN.